ART. IV.-Collections on Irish Church History, from the Manuscripts of the late Laurence F. Renehan, D.D. President of Maynooth College, edited by the Rev. Daniel McCarthy. Warren, Dublin, 1861.

ANY years must elapse before the Ecclesiastical tween the Reformation and the present time, can have materials ready to hand for a work so great and so varied as the history of the Irish Church. The materials exist no doubt and in greater abundance than would be perhaps believed; but they are found in distant places and in precious collections, to which access cannot be had always through industry, and sometimes not even by favour. Every year opens up new sources of information, and every eminence which at first bounds the view of the explorer and seems to mark the end of his journey, discloses when gained a new horizon, a richer field of discovery, and other summits to be reached. Nor is it only in great libraries to which the well applied wealth of National exchequers, or of large private fortunes, has drawn treasures of information from whatsoever source, that the events of Irish Church History are to be sought. Stray manuscripts preserved, God knows how, find their way into faithful hands by chances savouring of miracle; and lost clues are recovered with apparent simplicity, but under favour of a real Providence. The peculiar circumstances of the Irish Nation during the three centuries and a half which followed the change of religion in England, have rendered the Church History of Ireland a more laborious study than that of any Church in Europe. It would serve no purpose to speculate upon the causes which led to the comparatively easy subversion of the English, Scottish, and Scandinavian Churches. The preservation or change of religion in Germany ascribable in the first instance to the divine protection, permission, or judgment, seems referable, humanly speaking, to the policy of Emperors and Electors. For it is quite certain that although Germany was desolated by what are called religious wars, whole Churches held or renounced their religion at the bidding of their temporal masters; and, that while in the now Protestant States of Germany there must have been

some faithful Catholics, and consequently some victims, these good men are little known to history, and were in no sense the representatives of a national martyrdom. Church after Church fell in like the storeys of a burning house, with sharp and speedy sufferings for some; but then was the end of the Churches, and their history had been written once for all. In France, the religious struggle can hardly be said to belong to Church history: it was carried on almost entirely in the field. The cruelties and crimes of both Catholics and Huguenots were the same as are found in all civil wars, and although they may occasion some dis"gust to the Historian, cannot cost him much trouble to verify or to record. The persecutions by which the Church of England was all but extinguished were very cruel and devoured very many victims; but after a short time indeed. the great bulk of the nation took part with the persecutors against the helpless, even if somewhat large minority of their countrymen. The Church of England may be said to have perished in the reign of Elizabeth; and although her Stuart successors were not idle in the work of persecution, they came in but as gleaners after the harvest. In other countries of Europe where religion either had been preserved or finally triumphed, controversies and struggles of great interest detain the attention of the historian. Strange doctrines make their appearance, are debated, condemned and disappear. The State stretches out its hand to afflict the Church either with small and vexatious tyranny as in many a country that we know; or exterminates by massacre and exile, as in the great French revolution, the entire clergy of the nation. Sometimes reforms are needed and effected in spiritual corporations or even in entire Churches; but the Church and nation of Ireland amongst all Churches and nations have alone endured and outlived a persecution hardly interrupted for three hundred years, and an oppression which even now does not promise soon to end. The same persecutions that scattered the Irish race, and more especially the Irish clergy during so long a period, served to scatter materials for the history of their Church over every country in Europe. When education clerical or secular was unattainable by Catholics here, those seminaries were established on the Continent without which the preservation of religion would seem to hav been impossible in England and Ireland. In relation to the former country their duty although pious was not cheered

by promise or rewarded for the time with apparent fruit. The utmost that the seminary priest could hope for in ministering to the thin and scattered remnant of the English Catholics, would be to save a very little seed for the distant future. He staked his life upon every mass and every baptism, and never put on stole before a servant of the house where he officiated without a consciousness, or at least a well grounded apprehension, that he was supplying evidence to an informer. He so staked, and often so lost his life for this Catholic lord, or that Catholic gentleman; but however his trust in God, or a hopeful cast of mind might teach him to look for the restoration of religion, he was too well acquainted with the state of England not to know that his own mission was not to a people but to individuals.

The continental seminaries and other institutions which Popes and Kings had established for the Irish service, were engaged in ministering to an entire people. The Church of Ireland was liable as a matter of course to some of those failings from which the oldest and most faithful Churches have not been exempt. The sturdy controversies in which she engaged so early upon minute points of discipline would seem to mark that flush of blood and almost excess of life on which she had to draw in her after history. The political condition too, of Ireland from the very introduction of Christianity to the reign_of_Henry VIII. when it was further complicated by the English schism, was of itself sufficient to try the strength of any Churchi. From the days of St. Patrick to those of Archbishop Plunket, war either virtuous and patriotic, or immoral and cut-throat, was as much the occupation of the Irish tribes, as hunting is that of the American Indians. It would probably be no exaggeration to say that every Irishman of the fighting age, excepting priests and monks, was under arms for more than half the year in line or in guerillas, way-laying, surprising, slaughtering, burning and plundering, whether in wars of defence, ambition, revenge or pure wantonness. We have all heard of the Theban legion and of other bodies of Christian warriors; but it may be said of the holiest wars ever inspired by patriotism or religion, that, as a rule, they do not conduce to the practice either of the evangelical counsels, or of the theological virtues, or in truth to the obser vance of any one of the ten commandments. It is

therefore perfectly consistent with the great fertility of Ireland in Saints, that irregularities, to call them by no harsher name, should be found amongst clergy and laity throughout her early history; but whatever may have been the nature or extent of those scandals, the Irish Church never showed symptoms of dissolution or even of faintness, and least of all when her three centuries of persecution began in the reign of Henry VIII. Though bruised and broken in every limb, though stripped of all beauty and comeliness, and bleeding from countless wounds, she had a palpitating life in every nerve and every vein, and seemed to have been endued with supernatural strength for the express purpose of suffering. She needed comfort, sustainment and medicine, but she always had a strength and constitution upon which to work. She had never to be revived, much less to be created anew. The English government after having emptied the religious houses, and dispersed the clergy, set up a mock hierarchy with whom the Church of Ireland, lay or clerical, Celtic or Norman, within the pale or without, had no more communion than with the spiritual emperor of Japan. Even at the present day the English Church establishment in Ireland has no representatives worth mentioning amongst the old inhabitants of either race. Wexford, the oldest and most purely English county of the Pale, is now as Catholic as Cork or Galway; and if we except the comparatively small number who have been recruited to the Church establishment in Dublin and in other large cities from the foundling hospitals and charter schools, or who had been attracted thither by accidental circumstances, the Irish Protestants, whether of the established or of dissenting forms, will be found to come from the various English plantations subsequent to the reign of Elizabeth. No one therefore can pretend that the slightest inroad was made by English power upon the Church that found favour with the Irish people. The English Government did certainly plant new colonies and with them new churches, but that is the full measure of its success. Some may account for this by the political circumstances of the country, others will refer it to higher agencies; but the fact is undisputed that for three hundred years the entire strength of the English monarchy was applied without result to effect a change in the religion of the Irish. The laws that were devised for this purpose and the means by which they were enforced are familiar

to most educated men in those countries. As for the laws although they describe themselves sufficiently well without any commentary, they have the benefit of Edmund Burke's readings, and few would care to attempt a reading after his. We have also good reason to know in what way those laws were executed, at the cost of how much blood and human suffering of every kind, how often the Irish stood in arms for their religion, how it fared with them when defeated, how faith was kept with them, what became of their lands, and how lately any change took place in the rule by which it was sought to impose the new religion upon the natives, and to preserve it amongst the colonists. It is also very sensibly felt, that although the execution of the old laws was relaxed many years ago, for what reasons, or under what influences we are not now to inquire; and that although many of those laws have been expressly cancelled or have fallen into disuse, under what compulsion again we are not particularly concerned to state; the same spirit that prompted the penal code is alive in our modern legislation; and the substitution of one religion for another in Ireland, is the apparent and logical even if not the avowed intent of our statutes in religious matters. Nor should it be left out of view that side by side with the penal laws, grew up the system of seduction which is always the twin sister of persecution, and which has acted with more torturing effect, although with smaller numerical results in Ireland than in any country exposed to influences of a like description. And last of all we know that the seduction referred too, is even now practised with a skill and vigour unsurpassed at any period of its existence. This being so, nothing can be easier than to sum the results of three hundred years of English effort occasionally relaxed but not intermitted, to effect a change of religion in Ireland. The descendants of the hostile races who occupied Ireland in the reign of Henry VIII., are in belief exactly what their fathers were before the protest of Spires, with this additional advantage, that their unity of belief and unity of suffering, have jointed them fast into the same nationality. This is the short result stated in the dryest way and having reference to the island of Ireland merely; but it would look much more wonderful if we should first carry back our minds to the time when the churches of Ireland were invaded, her monasteries sacked and dismantled, her charitable institutious and church